Museum gives Chinatown chance to tell its own story

May 21, 2005|By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Tribune staff reporter.

At 16, Raymond Lee made his living hovering over a giant wok full of boiling soybean paste, spending hours on the intricate process that turned it into tofu. Then he would duck out to run the final product to restaurants throughout Chinatown.

For a decade Lee labored on the lower floors of the narrow brick building and slept in a small compartment above.

Today Lee owns a major wholesaler of Asian foods, supplying tofu to much of the Midwest. And he has helped buy the same building on West 23rd Street where he once worked and lived to house the new Chinese-American Museum of Chicago, which opens to the public Saturday.

For Lee, 70, the museum is a chance to bring the history of Chinatown--his history--alive for a generation that is losing contact with a pivotal piece of its culture, a time when hardship and moxie shaped lives and the landscape.

"It will give tremendous inspiration to the young people," Lee said of the museum.

For Chinatown, the new museum is a sort of rite of passage--a sign that the once-struggling community now has the resources to tell its own story, for future generations in the neighborhood and the rest of the city.

"The economic issue is no longer as pressing as before, so I think the time is right," said Chuimei Ho, president of the group that created the museum.

The Chinese-American Museum joins a growing array of ethnic museums in the Chicago area. About a dozen institutions--some major complexes, some modest storefronts--chronicle the singular stories of each community.

The list includes stalwarts such as the Polish Museum of America, which opened in 1937; the DuSable Museum of African-American History, the nation's first black museum, founded in 1961; and the Spertus Museum of Judaica.

It also features lesser-known attractions such as the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture near Midway Airport and the new Cambodian American Heritage Museum in Lincoln Square.

While all immigrant stories form a common yarn, the threads differ. Some groups came to America fleeing brutal regimes. Others moved simply for hope of a better life.

Often communities hope to enshrine these tales in bricks and mortar before the storytellers die, an increasingly urgent mission for third- and fourth-generation Americans.

Though traditional museums are paying more attention than ever to ethnic communities, many community activists feel they ought to be telling their own stories.

"For the Chinese-American Museum, right away those who are of Chinese-American descent say, `This is for us,'" Ho said.

It's a matter of passion and perspective, said Carlos Tortolero, president of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. His institution's exhibit on Mexican-American civil rights leader Cesar Chavez has the activist speaking on a TV monitor. But rather than putting the television set on the wall, it sits on the bed of a pickup truck surrounded by crates and images of farm workers whose rights he defended.

"We see the world through a Eurocentric slant, and this has been institutionalized," Tortolero said. "Sometimes when mainstream museums interpret our culture, they see it in that fashion. It doesn't mean they aren't doing a good job, but overwhelmingly it doesn't capture who we are."

The Chinese-American Museum of Chicago is not the first of its kind in Chinatown. The oldest Chinese-American museum in the country opened in the Near South Side neighborhood in 1933.

But after four decades of family ownership, one of the key principals died, and eventually the museum shut its doors. Exhibits from that museum, which included a collection of Chinese dioramas, were bought and donated to the new museum by Jeffrey Moy, the grandson of one of Chinatown's founders.

Moy had also bought the Quong Yick building, where Raymond Lee once lived and worked. Moy had planned to open a gallery there, but when he heard about plans for a new museum, he offered to sell his building to the foundation below market rates.

Lee, who has been instrumental in reviving Chinatown with, among other things, a park and the booming Chinatown Square plaza, also was interested in the idea of a museum. When he heard the museum foundation had the chance to buy the Quong Yick building, he jumped at the opportunity to help, pledging $660,000 for the purchase.

The new museum has reconstructed a hand laundry, evoking the several hundred Chinese laundries that once thrived in Chicago. It has furnishings from family associations that helped build Chinatown and textiles embroidered here for Chinese festivities.

As word of the museum spread, it inspired Chinatown residents to drop by with photo albums in hand, or to donate old bamboo and ivory mah-jongg tiles.

Many photos of a Chinese laundry, run along with a family farm in Michigan, were donated by Ruth Moy, Jeffrey Moy's mother and the matriarch of one of the most prominent families in Chinatown.